David Rabban

Visiting Research Scholar

Home Institution, University of Texas School of Law

LAPA Fellow, 2016-2017

David M. Rabban is the Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail, and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair in Law and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. His areas of expertise include the First Amendment, higher education and the law, labor law, and legal history. He is the author of Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (2013), which was designated a “notable title in American intellectual history” by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, and Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (1997), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Eli M. Oboler Award from the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Round Table. He has published numerous articles about labor law, the history of free speech, and academic freedom. He was General Counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. Rabban is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Stanford Law School. Rabban was named a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. During his year at LAPA, he will work on a book on the history, theory, and law of academic freedom.